Piston Cloud Computing is one of the leading companies in the Open Source OpenStack effort. Piston is now getting some new leadership of its own, appointing industry veteran Jim Morrisroe as CEO.

Piston Cloud was founded by Joshua McKenty, one of the leaders of the open source Nebula platform at NASA, that became the core Nova compute module in OpenStack. McKenty had previously held the role of CEO and will now be the CTO.

Morrisroe had previously been the President and General Manager of Zimbra, an open source email startup that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 and then sold to VMwarefor in 2010.

Related Articles

Morrisroe told Datamation that he left VMware in May of this year and took some time to unwind. He then sought out a company in a growing market and found Piston Cloud. In his view, the potential market size that OpenStack represents is a very large one. OpenStack got its start originally with just NASA and Rackspace and has since grown to include many major IT vendors, including IBM, Dell, HP and Intel and many others.

Piston Cloud founder Joshua McKenty noted that he had always planned on bringing in professional management to help guide his company. In terms of timing, McKenty said that the rapid growth of OpenStack is what is driving the need for Piston Cloud to have a new CEO now. McKenty is one of the leaders of the OpenStack Foundation, which is a non-trivial time commitment.

"If OpenStack loses, Piston has nothing of value," McKenty said. "So I really need to make sure we're doing everything we can for OpenStack as well as for the Piston Cloud business and this is the only way I see that I can move them both forward."